Thinking Things Through
27
Royce’s concept of blessed community, building on Rousseau’s notion of civic
religion, resurrected now by Steeves’s recombinant lamentations: ‘"should I
return in the muscle of a fish, in the blood of a buzzard, in the toes of a lizard,
you may not [ever] recognize me” (63, parenthetical added). As Tom Joad
knows, it won’t matter, if only because “I’ll be all aroun’ in the dark. I’ll be
ever’where—wherever you look.”^^ That’s the kind of religion, or (Tillichian)
ultimate concern you can’t argue with. You just take it on faith, provided you
can say it with a straight (not poker) face. Maybe once we all learn to say it
straight, we’ll think straight, see straight, and act straight. Until then, it’s wise to
remember what Walter Connolly (Mr. Jones) told Barbara Stanwyck (Megan
Devis) as they roiled from the ravages of the Manchurian invasion on a slow
boat from (not to) mainland China, casualties, not of war but of their love and
admiration for the same man:
Maybe the Joke’s on us. [General] Yen was crazy. He said we
never die—we only change. He was nuts about cherry trees.
Well, maybe he’s a cherry tree now—maybe he’s the wind
that’s pushing that sail—maybe he’s the wind that’s playing
around your hair. Ah, it’s all a lot of hooey. I’m drunk. Just
the same, 1 hope when I cool off, the guy who changes me
sends me where[ver] Yen is. And I’ll bet I’ll find you there
too.'^
Peter, when I die. I’ll go looking for you—that is, if you don’t find me first. I
have a hunch that we’ll end up being (and not being) in the same place at the
same time. That’s not so strange, is it, Hegel? Once you give up consistency, the
world suddenly makes complete sense, in all of its chaotic lunacy and utter
nonsense. As Billy Pilgrim recounted his odyssey, quoting from the Gospel
according to Vince Lombardi and Soren Kierkegaard, dying isn’t the main thing,
it’s the only thing. That is, until we decide once and for all to stop killing each
other. When that happens. I’ll move to Tralfamadore, and you’re coming with
me. After all, I wouldn’t want to leave you alone. You might end up writing
another great book—and then what would I do for company? Gloria was
wrong—faces aren’t enough; we also need dialogue. And a few of those funny
things we call thinkers to keep talking, till death do us depart. Like Walt (our
national bard), Peter is large, he contains multitudes. And at this very moment,
as on the shores of eternity, after all this time, he stops somewhere, waiting for
me.
University of San Diego
Dennis Rohatyn
Notes
' Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Slaughterhouse-Five or the Children 5 Crusade, A Duty-Dance with
Death, 1969; 25‘^ anniversary ed., new preface by the author, (New York, 1994), 200.
Film, dir. George Roy Hill, 1972.